5/2/17

InterAction Centre

InterAction
Centre

London,
England. 1972-1977 (Demolished in 2003)

Architect:
Cedric Price

"As I am a generous person with a restricted intellect, I like to
think that all these people that like exchanging things will be able to have
fun but also working to infinite. There is the possibility of expanding the
building in the unfinished areas and towards its length. What I like most of
this building is not the image of a potential future but the current demand to
be manipulated."

The endless Fun Palace project (1961)
became a graphic manifesto that evolved in a series of small projects where Cedric Price
developed several of his original ideas in an isolated and an independent form.
Perhaps, the InterAction Center constructed in London between 1972 and 1997 was
the closes built project to the original idea in terms of mutability of
programs, possibility of expanding it and construction with industrial materials.

This social center appears as a
great ludic building, with a complex
program an materialization but enclosed by a large structural truss that allows
different internal configurations and transformations. Its linear geometry open
the possibility to the center to be extended horizontally almost indefinitely
without great difficulty. Cedric Price fostered this perception by only filling
up the central part and completing the rest of the program with an ephemeral
architecture made of containers, temporary stands, etc. This decision and the
own materiality of the project using industrial materials generate the idea of
an architecture in constant transformation and overcomes the utopian idea to a
real possibility creating an believable image
that represents it. Its demolition in 2013 was a great lost for the architectural
legacy of London but it reinforces this idea.